Will I lose my rankings if I move off Wix? What travels with you, and the 474 KB you leave behind
On 9 September I ran 236 real UK trade websites, pulled off my own cold-call lead sheets, through a check that records what each homepage is built on and how many bytes it sends to the phone in your customer's hand. The median Wix homepage in that sample transferred 474 KB. The median hand-coded one transferred 19 KB.
That is the part of this decision nobody mentions, because the question everyone asks first is the fearful one: if I move, do I lose everything Google has given me? It is a fair worry and the answer is more mechanical than it feels. Rankings are filed against a web address. Keep the address and you keep the filing.
What follows is what actually transfers, what was never yours to transfer, and the three questions that decide which of those two you are in.
No, provided your domain and your page addresses come with you. Google files a ranking against a web address rather than against the company hosting it, so a UK trade site that keeps the same domain and the same paths has nothing structural to lose. The exception is a free wixsite.com address, which belongs to Wix and cannot move. Expect a short re-crawl wobble, not a reset.
The 474 KB you are currently carrying
Across 193 readable UK trade homepages measured on 9 September 2026, the median Wix homepage transferred 474 KB and the median hand-coded one 19 KB. Fifty-one of the 53 hand-coded sites were lighter than the single lightest Wix site in the sample.
193 homepages that answered on 9 September 2026, taken from my own cold-call lead sheets across England and Wales. Bytes transferred for the homepage document and everything it pulled in. The Squarespace, GoDaddy and Weebly rows rest on fewer than eight sites each, so read those as indicative rather than settled.
Eleven of the 24 Wix sites sent more than half a megabyte. The heaviest sent 944 KB, for a one-page site advertising a fencing contractor. Only 30 of all 193 sites measured were heavier than the lightest Wix site, which tells you the floor matters as much as the median: Wix does not have a light setting.
Why weight belongs in a ranking conversation at all
Google does not rank pages on their file size, and anybody who tells you it does is selling something. What weight does is drive Largest Contentful Paint, the measure of how long the main thing on the page takes to appear, and that is one of the Core Web Vitals Google documents under page experience. On a good broadband connection none of this shows. On a British customer standing in a lane in Herefordshire with one bar of 4G, 474 KB and 19 KB are a different experience entirely, and it is the second one that gets the phone call.
Rankings sit on the address, not on the platform
Google files what it knows against a URL. Move the same page, on the same domain, to a different server, and as far as Search is concerned nothing has happened except that the page got better.
This is the whole of it, and it is why the fear is usually misplaced. Your domain is registered
with a registrar, not with Wix. Your page at /bathroom-fitting/ is an address, not a
file that lives inside a particular company. When a new site answers on that same address with
the same subject matter, Google re-crawls it and carries on. Its own published guidance is
about asking it to re-crawl the changed URLs, through Search Console for a handful of pages and
through a sitemap for the whole site, which is the housekeeping rather than the risk.
The wobble, and what it is not
Re-crawling is not instant, so positions move about for a few weeks while Google works through the new pages. That is a timing effect. It is not the same as losing the rankings, and the distinction matters, because the panic decision, switching everything back after nine days, is what actually costs people their positions.
The three questions that decide whether you lose anything
Everything turns on three yes or no answers: is the domain yours, are the addresses staying the same, and is the content coming with you. Two yeses and a no is a straightforward move. A no on the first is a fresh start in disguise.
The two sites in my sample that really would start again
Of the 236 UK trade websites checked, two were still published on a free wixsite.com subdomain, and one on a wordpress.com one. Those three own no address at all.
This is a small number and it is the only group in the whole audit with something real to lose.
Everything Google knows about a business at something.wixsite.com is filed under an
address that belongs to Wix. There is no redirect to set up, because you cannot configure a
redirect on a domain you do not control. If that is your situation, buy the .co.uk first, put it
in your own name, and treat the rankings you have as a bonus rather than an asset. A domain costs
less than a tank of diesel and it is the only part of this that compounds.
What Wix publishes about taking a site away
Wix's own help centre is explicit that the build cannot leave: "since Wix is a SaaS solution, your site must run on Wix's servers." There is no export, so a move off Wix is always a rebuild.
The same page describes the site as a standard HTML5 site made with Wix's technology, then adds the condition that matters: "in order for your site to work properly, it needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers." So the honest framing of this decision is not "move my site", it is "rebuild my site and keep my address". Your domain moves, your photographs and your words are yours to copy out, and the pages are built again. What that means in practice, on which platforms, and what you can get back from an old designer, is set out in how to get your website files from your designer.
Two things to get out before the plan lapses
Your original photographs at full resolution, which are usually the only irreplaceable item, and the list of every page address. Both become much harder to recover once the subscription stops, and the second one is the thing this whole article depends on.
The order to do it in
Nothing here is difficult. It goes wrong when the old site is switched off before the new one answers on the same address.
What the replacement costs
Because a move off Wix is a rebuild, the number that matters is the cost of a new site rather than a migration fee. With Sitework there is no build fee at all: £50 every four weeks, and a free mockup of your actual business before you pay anything or cancel anything.
That £50 covers the site, hosting, the domain, SSL, backups and unlimited small text and photo edits. Three months minimum, then rolling, and after twelve months the website and the domain are yours to keep with no exit fee. The wider range of what trade websites are quoted, and what each price band actually buys, is broken down on what a tradesman's website costs.
The sequencing is the useful part. I build the mockup while your Wix site is still up and still taking enquiries, so you see the replacement before you give notice on anything, and there is never a week with no website. Live in about a week once you say go.